Culture

Joyce in Bloom

Echoing Homer, rifﬁng on Shakespeare, teeming with puns, palindromes, and allusions, Ulysses was a revolutionary exploration of the consciousness of its hero, Leopold Bloom. On the hundredth “Bloomsday,” the author bows to James Joyce’s novel, so long a target of censors, for the delights and discoveries it offers with every reading.

Asurly English overseer is standing at the entrance to a construction site in London. It’s a filthy, wet day. He sees approaching him a shabby figure, with clay pipe clenched in mouth and a battered raincoat, and scowlingly thinks, Another effing Mick on the scrounge. The Irishman shambles up to him and asks if there’s any casual job going. “You don’t look to me,” says the supervisor, “as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist.” “I do, too,” says the Irishman indignantly. “The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses.”

This is my favorite “Irish” joke, not just because it revenges itself on generations of nasty English caricature—to have represented the Irish, the people of Swift and Wilde and Shaw and Yeats, as stupid, of all things— but because it is itself Joycean. His universe of words was a torrent of puns, palindromes, parallels, parodies, and plagiarisms (with a good deal of Parnell stirred into the alliteration). Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is “naïve” spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of “bonsai.” Preparing some salad the other day, I murmured, “I knew Olive Oyl before she was an extra virgin.” Joyce could do this, at an infinitely higher standard of multiple entendre, drawing on several languages, for pages on end, so that—depending on your level of awareness, and your capacity to spot new allusions and analogies—you never reopen the same book of his, or even the same chapter, without realizing that you are holding a new text in your hands and haven’t really read it before.

Word games and word jokes are the special province of growing children who are coming into language for the first time (lucky them). And, lucky for us, Joyce was a startling case of infantilism and arrested development. Why, just for a start, did he pick June 16, 1904, as the day on which Mr. Leopold Bloom of Dublin, at first alone and then in the company of Stephen Dedalus, mimics the several stages of Homer’s Odyssey before dropping anchor with his blowsy Penelope, the dirty-minded Molly Bloom? On that day the newspapers reported on a terrible ferry accident at New York’s Hell Gate and a war—between Russia and Japan—that would curtain-raise the Great War of 1914. These events are mulled over in the city, along with a spectacular reversal of fortune at the horse races, as Bloom goes on his way. But this wasn’t what had fixed the date forever in the mind of James Joyce. On that day, he had made a rendezvous with a chambermaid, by the marvelous name of Nora Barnacle, who had newly arrived from Galway. She had failed to keep their first appointment (after he had initially picked her up in the street) and by a nice coincidence kept him standing outside the house of Oscar Wilde’s father, on Merrion Square. But the second date exceeded his expectations. The couple took a walk out to Ringsend, beyond the city’s docks, where, as Joyce later told her in a molten letter, it was not he who made a move but “you who slid your hand down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes.”

A century later, the literary world will celebrate the hundredth “Bloomsday,” in honor of the very first time the great James Joyce received a handjob from a woman who was not a prostitute.

Many fine writers have sought to handle this delicate yet simple subject. One thinks of Mark Twain’s “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” or of Martin Amis, who did a good deal of hard and valuable reflection about handjobs in Money, and naturally of Philip Roth’s Portnoy (“I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off!”). But, all too often, the subject matter here is the humble, unassuming, solitary version, sometimes adopted for reasons of economy (“Overheads are generally low,” as Amis’s John Self ruefully reflects) as well as for reasons of, well, solitude. Though it may be possible to take pride in one’s work in this department, also. Joyce certainly did. When a stranger in a café in Zurich seized him by the mitt and exclaimed, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses,” Joyce responded, “No—it did lots of other things too.” But the greatest effusion ever unleashed by a single, properly managed, and expertly administered (and how often can you say that?) female-to-male handjob is beyond doubt the 735-page mastur-piece that was first published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris, in just 1,000 numbered editions, in February of 1922—since which date, our concept of the novel has revolutionized itself.

I shall be returning to self-abuse as a theme (trust me), but I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line “Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s daughter.” So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too.

Then take the vast, continuing controversy over the bigotry of T. S. Eliot. In a notorious lecture entitled “After Strange Gods,” delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, Eliot had said that the presence of “too many free-thinking Jews” was “undesirable” in a well-ordered society. Seeking to define what was meant by a traditional community, he proposed that we call it “the same people, living in the same place.” And this deceptively simple formulation is taken word for word from Leopold Bloom, who offers it in Barney Kiernan’s pub when challenged, and then challenged again, by a violently anti-Jewish Irish nationalist. Nobody knows why Eliot chose to quote Bloom, without attribution, in a public address designed to attack Jewish influence. All we know is that he admired Joyce extravagantly, and that a novel mined by Orwell and Eliot within a year or so of each other, when Ulysses was still a banned book, is a considerable literary force.

In some intuitive manner, Joyce seems to have had the premonition that the Jewish question would be crucial to the 20th century. (He was to die in 1941 while fleeing the German advance in Europe.) When not with Nora, or when not writing her frenziedly masturbatory letters, far, far fiercer than the mild incitements that Bloom sends to and receives from his mystery lady, he sought out Jewish girls (perhaps to be certain that they were not Catholics). One of Bloom’s first actions is to stop at a pork butcher’s and, in this improbable setting, to pick up a Zionist leaflet from an organization based in Berlin. Joyce admired the Jews because, like the Greeks, they lived in a diaspora and because, like Odysseus, they were wanderers. Furthermore, the Jews and Greeks proved that it was possible to worship higher goals without surrendering to the especial horror of Holy Mother Church—Joyce’s lifelong enemy. He unceasingly blamed the priesthood for, among other things, the betrayal and abandonment of Charles Stewart Parnell, the heroic Protestant nationalist leader who was taken in adultery.

Indeed, largely because of that church, Joyce himself was forced to live in exile from Ireland most of his life, and much of Ulysses is an attempt to reconstruct, from memory, the sight and sound and feel of his beloved Dublin. “Nostalgia” means literally a return home, and Joyce pined for the banks and bridges of the River Liffey as Odysseus had for Ithaca. Furthermore—and like Homer himself—he suffered from blindness. Those with poor vision are often compensated with extra sensation in other faculties, and Joyce’s language pays minute attention to the sound and smell of everything, from food to horses to women. He loved strong color for the same reason, and insisted that the first edition of Ulysses be bound in a very specific shade of blue—the color of the Greek sea on which Odysseus had first sailed to recapture Helen, and then sailed again to escape from Troy. (Ask yourself, by the way, what part of Helen it was that Odysseus had failed to win. Her hand … )

Bloom is Ulysses/Odysseus himself in Joyce’s highly individual version of the story, and if you love the original there is delight to be had in guessing which adventure is which. The Dublin “nighttown” brothel run by Bella Cohen is Circe’s cave. The restaurant full of nauseating food and disgusting eaters is the encounter with the Laestrygonian cannibals. The enraged Jew-baiting Sinn Féiner is the Cyclops Polyphemus. And Bloom, whose son died in infancy, needs a Telemachus for his Ulysses and finds him, or fancies that he does, in Stephen Dedalus. Daedalus was the genius of antiquity who designed the impenetrable labyrinth that held the Minotaur, and the man who first learned to fly (losing his own son, Icarus, in the experiment). Together, in the second half of the voyage, Bloom and Dedalus negotiate the warrens and back alleys of Dublin’s labyrinth, while Dedalus soars like Icarus with flights of poetry and quotation. At the end, with Jew and Greek united in one synthesis, Joyce gives us a long call-and-response section (“Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?” “Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?”) with most answers many, many times longer than the questions. In my opinion, while this is fairly obviously an echo of Plato’s Symposium, it also evokes the question-and-answer part of the Passover Seder, with its emphasis on the education of the young. Wine is involved in both Symposium and Seder, and Ulysses is nothing if not well lubricated with gallons of booze.

Talking of lubrication … for all its soaring, Ulysses repeatedly comes back to earth in the earthiest sense, and reminds us that natural functions and decay and sexual frustration are part of the common lot. Here, Joyce’s childishness about potty humor and playing with yourself was an enormous help to him. We are familiar now with the idea of “interior monologue” and “stream of consciousness,” but nobody before Joyce had shown us a man—Bloom—partly planning his day around his handjobs. He at first thinks that he’ll jerk off at the steam baths, but changes his mind and is glad he did because, encountering Gerty MacDowell and her girlfriends frolicking on the beach (Odysseus on Nausicaa’s island), he is able to whack off to greater effect at a safe distance (as does, if I’m not mistaken, frisky Gerty herself). Joyce wrote to a friend about this passage, describing it as a “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto la!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painters palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc. etc.”

Bloom’s fantasies are mood swings of insecurity. At times, he is grandly imagined as a future Jewish lord mayor of Dublin. (In 1956, a Jew named Robert Briscoe actually was elected mayor of Dublin. When this news was brought to Yogi Berra he commented, “Only in America.”) At other moments, Bloom is pictured with his own soft and vulnerable figure ignominiously on trial, with all his dirty secrets exposed. The expert medical witness in one such scene, Dr. Malachi Mulligan, pronounces him “prematurely bald from selfabuse.” The doctor’s namesake, the “plump Buck Mulligan” who opens the narrative, cannot stay off the subject, either. (He pro-poses a play called “Everyman His own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand.”) And all the time, as he negotiates this jizz-flecked environment, Bloom is queasily aware that his Molly—his Penelope—has been giving herself to another man, or men. In the vast, rambling, lubricious, and unpunctuated soliloquy that closes the novel, Molly Bloom herself reviews some of her better bedroom moments and may well be having the longest solitary climax, or series of climaxes, ever set down on a page. The Victorians were evidently dead wrong when they said that wanking made you listless and unproductive (though Joyce might have wondered furtively and occasionally, and with good apparent reason, about the cause of his own blindness).

That great Victorian Matthew Arnold thought that the true cultural balance was between Hellenism and Hebraism, or between the polytheistic, the philosophical, and the aesthetic and the spare, stern monotheism of the Old Testament. He also believed that poetry should replace religion as the source of ethics and morality. Joyce, who liked the idea of Hellenizing and He-braizing Ireland, and who refused—like his Stephen Dedalus—to kneel in prayer even at his mother’s deathbed, employed literature to stave off guilt and to ward off faith. It was for this reason, as much as for any “indecency,” that his Ulysses was for so long seized and burned by the police and customs. The book was held to be blasphemous and profane, as well as obscene. Nonetheless, when it first came to a trial, in New York City in December 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey had only to decide on the question of whether it was, or was not, pornographic. Which he did in the following unintentionally hilarious manner:

I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes “Ulysses” is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of “Ulysses” on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. “Ulysses” may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.

There, in all its rotund and brainless condescension, you have the censorship mentality, which is no less contemptible in its “liberal” mode. Joyce had managed to do something that few writers have even dared to attempt: the ventriloquizing of Shakespeare in such a manner that the reader may be unsure where the genuine leaves off and the parody begins. You try it. In fact, try reading the Hamlet passage in Ulysses aloud, which is a good scheme anyway since, like Homer, Joyce was hearing the music of language in his head and writing almost for recitation. And the censor will just about allow this, because, although it may make you sick, at least you won’t get sexually aroused! Puke, yes. Orgasms, no. Though James Joyce himself may have written—to Nora—with his pen in one hand and his thing in another, I, too, very much doubt that anyone has ever employed Ulysses as a “manual” of that kind. Which makes it magnificently sobering to reflect that, without the many and various thrills of gratification per mano, it might never have been composed at all.